Editorial

At the Conservative Party conference at the beginning of October 2021, Sajid Javid opined that health and social care should begin at home and that the state should not be the first port of call for individuals in need. He suggested that the ‘government shouldn’t own all risks and responsibilities in life’ and that individuals ‘have to take some responsibility’ too (Javid 2021). But the implications of this suggestion for women are clear. Women are more likely to be the primary caregivers in society with women carrying out more unpaid work than men (Office for National Statistics 2016, Seedat and Rondon 2021). This means that, inevitably, women will be left with the increasing care burden under such neoliberal policies that focus on personal responsibility and self-sufficiency in the social realm (Brown 2006, Hamann 2009). Furthermore, it was only in September 2021 that the government announced its sweeping reforms to social care by introducing the £86,000 payment cap. Whilst social care and social welfare reform therefore remains at the forefront of Conservative Party policy, the underlying gendered dimension of care remains an underpinning issue. This is highlighted in the recent Supreme Court case of SC and CB v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2021] UKSC 26. In a persuasive critique of the decision in the case comments section, Meghan Campbell argues that the decision legitimates discriminatory welfare cuts and that it ignores how the care of children is symptomatic of gendered disadvantage, therefore overlooking the ways in which poverty is shaped by gender.

In another case commentary, gender-based issues related to domestic abuse are raised in Mandy Burton’s critique of the conjoined appeal in Re H-N and others (Domestic Abuse: Findings of Fact Hearings) [2021] EWCA Civ 448. Despite guidance that has been in place for many years, she suggests that these conjoined appeals exemplify almost everything that can go wrong in child arrangement proceedings where there are allegations of domestic abuse. As Burton concludes, this judgement was delivered in the context of an active legal and policy environment for domestic abuse. Consequently, it is timely to have two further pieces covering domestic abuse issues in our articles section. First, the issue of Forced Marriage Protection Orders is examined by Kyia Noack-Lundberg, Aisha Gill and Sundari Anitha. In their thought-provoking article, they examined 33 reported cases involving a Forced Marriage Protection Order and provide an analysis of key themes emerging from these judgements. Not only do they suggest that their findings support the view that forced marriage should be viewed as a form of domestic abuse, but they found that perceptions of culture, consent, disability and victim credibility influenced how evidence was interpreted.

In our second article covering domestic abuse issues, Julieta Marotta presents findings from a qualitative study in Argentina with victims of domestic abuse. In exploring the issues of access to justice and legal empowerment, she argues that there are positive elements of accessing the justice system even when this did not directly achieve resolution of the conflict as it contributes to the empowerment of the victim through participation in the process.

Access to justice has been brought into even sharper focus as a consequence of the pandemic. In a recent survey of 3,200 professionals and families undertaken by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, concerns were raised about remote hearings ‘by default’ and the ongoing issues raised by the continuation of remote hearings, including concerns about fairness and lay parties being able to access technology to participate fully in hearings (Ryan et al. 2021). Concerns and problems raised by the Covid pandemic in relation to the family courts and family justice issues are highlighted in Kayliegh Richardson, Ana Speed, Callum Thomson and Laura Coapes’s article, where they present findings from interviews conducted with family justice professionals. In this piece they consider the effectiveness of remote/hybrid hearings in both private and public law children cases.

In the final two articles of this issue, we turn to consider different issues raised in the public law realm. In the first of these two pieces, Richard Green considers the modernisation of family justice with specific reference to public law care proceedings, whilst June Thoburn examines the processes and determining factors when family court judgements are made about infants entering care at birth. In this piece, she provides descriptive data on 278 care applications from three family court care centres as well as 30 judgements available from the BAILII database. She is then able to report on the proportion of orders made, the differences between the centres with regard to the proportion of orders made and the implications of having a judgment transcript available from a transparency perspective.